Jaimie WarrenThat's What Friends Are For

Jaimie Warren

That’s What Friends Are For

April 11 – May 4, 2014

Opening: Friday, April 11th from 6-9 pm

The Hole is proud to present our second solo exhibition of Kansas City/New York City artist Jaimie Warren. In this show Jaimie will debut a large and complex group videopiece in Gallery 2 that was many months and many people and many costumes in the making; while Gallery 1 will include new self-portrait works from her “totally looks like” and “food’lebrities” series, as well as a totally new body of work of GIFS where Jaimie injects a bit of motion and a bit of performance into her signature self-portrait creations.

Jaimie’s pièce de résistance is a five-channel video remake of Fra Angelico’s High Altarpiece of San Domenico in Fiesole, here recreated panel by panel featuring 200 of her friends. Each of the five panels is a tribute to personal cultural influences, selected by three generations of Warren’s family. Her grandmother’s selections include vintage entertainers like Betty Boop, Howdy Doody or Groucho Mark, with a few modern surprises like Liberace or JLo popping up, while her mother’s choices mix Pink Floyd, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison and Princess Diana, each character arranged as in the altarpiece painting. Warren’s panel of her favourite people is in the center where she appears as Missy Elliot in her famous garbage bag costume singing a duet with the possessed demon girl from The Exorcist. The portrait guide on the opposite wall in Gallery 2 will tell you who is who.

For her new GIF creations she trolls catchy internet video memes or B-movie blunders to find short clips of video she can remake frame by frame. They are composed like her elaborate self-portraits with make up, prostheses, masks, homemade sets and costumes, all real and no Photoshop; however, here there is the jerky motion of the GIF format that allows Warren to begin to sculpt a more filled out character or impersonation.

In this show we also find some great new additions to her classic “Totally Looks Like” or “Food’lebrities” menagerie with Lil’ Wayne totally looking like a Twilight Zone gremlin, Boy George totally looking like Ralph Wiggum, and some new food groups added like “Tuna Turner” or “Jack Pumpernickelson” and the tongue twister “Chicken Tikka Masalvador Dali.”

As Loring Knoblauch writes in his forthcoming essay on Warren, “Her campy silliness and makeshift costumes mask a much more thoughtful and consistent artistic investigation into how we build personal identity. Like an Internet-age sociologist, Warren is tracking our many quirks and fancies, taking note of what catches our eye, and carefully mapping the ways in which our shared ideas become inputs into who we are. In her world, pop culture has become a new kind of religion, and by using Fra Angelico’s altarpiece to channel the likes of the Lone Ranger, Liza Minnelli, Ghostface, and Flavor Flav, she has convincingly made the argument that we still mark ourselves by those we find inspirational.”